


they moved forward, my heart died

by TheJGatsby



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-Canon, Sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 06:14:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5323604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been so long. They’ve given up. He won’t, though. (Post season 2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	they moved forward, my heart died

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dead Hearts by Stars
> 
> I’ve figured out I have a talent for angst and serious stuff. I’m embracing it. Still wish I was witty tho. The book Bellamy references towards the end is Stardust by Neil Gaiman.

“I can’t stop thinking about you.”

He says it as he sits down on the ground in front of the tree with her name on it, crossing his legs and taking off the bow and arrow strapped to his back. They don’t let him have a gun for hunting expeditions, it wastes bullets. Lincoln taught them how to make bows, and Bellamy’s getting pretty good at archery. He only misses about two out of ten shots now, although most of his arrows don’t land right where he intends them. He gets meat for Camp Jaha, which is what counts.

They declared the dropship site their graveyard the winter after Mount Weather, because an illness struck the camp and they ended up with fifty dead, and they had to put them somewhere, so they went back to the dropship and buried the bones from the battle between the delinquents and the grounders and they started a real graveyard. Now the empty metal structure stands at the center of a cluster of small markers, monuments to everyone they’ve lost. The dropship walls are still up, the original ones, and there’s another eighteen markers just outside them, where they buried the kids they lost in those first few, horrible weeks. Every time Bellamy walks past them, he can feel guilt and self-hatred coil in his gut, and he always pauses by their grave and sends up a prayer, an apology for his failures, for the fact that they were all dead, however indirectly, because of him and his need to look after his own skin before trying to protect the people around him. He remembers all of their names. How could he forget? The blood on his hands haunts him every night, nightmares that stay on the back of his eyelids even after he wakes in a cold sweat, screaming.

He makes a stop at the graveyard every time he leaves camp. He leaves camp a lot. He’s one of the Sky People’s best hunters, so he takes every opportunity to go out into the woods. They have an understanding with the Grounders now, a peace fostered after many shaky talks. Octavia and Lincoln became the unofficial ambassadors between the two peoples, their strange foot-in-both-worlds status granting them a unique perspective. He couldn’t be prouder of his sister. He can barely look at her without feeling like he can’t breathe, like the world is a box too small around him.

Staying in camp is hard for him. He understands, in a way, why she had to leave. It makes him dizzy, some days, looking at the people around him. Without the worries of war to occupy him all he can do is wonder whose kid died because of his incompetence on the ground, whose family is gone because he broke Raven’s radio and forced the Ark to cull 350 people. If he was a better man he’d find out, seek them out, apologize. He’s not, though. So when the ghosts around him start to make him feel like Lady Macbeth, he takes a game bag and a bow and arrow and heads for the woods. There’s something cathartic about the woods, and it’s easy to lose himself in the hunt. He likes to think that, by feeding Camp Jaha, he’s making up, inch by inch, for the miles of damage he’s done. It’ll never be enough. It makes the regret less infinite.

Visiting the graveyard is the other way he tries to confront the massiveness of all the horrible things he’s done. He visits her grave, every time. Well, not her grave- she’s not buried there. It’s just a marker. About a year after she left they put it up. They gave up hope, decided she’d been gone too long- if she wanted to come back, she would have by then, so she was either dead or gone forever, which are, when it comes down to it, the same thing. They carved her name into a piece of metal and nailed it to a tree. Her mother visits, occasionally, but not often. The rest of the delinquents do, too- Bellamy’s been present, unseen, for a lot of weeping over her. Jasper came by once, and Bellamy got there in the middle of him telling her how sorry he was for the way he acted after Mount Weather, that he was angry and grieving, that he understood she’d had no real choice and it wasn’t her fault the odds were against them. Raven was there when Bellamy got there, another time, but she was silent, just glaring at the tree like it could provide her the answers and the peace she needed. She left when she saw Bellamy, and never said anything to him about it. Octavia went with Bellamy one day, and just stared at her name for a long time before saying, “I can’t act like I understand why you made the decisions you did. But I wasn’t there. I’m not you. I don’t think I’ll ever understand. But we trusted you- my brother trusted you- for a reason, so… I’m going to trust that you made the best call you could. You were brave and loyal and I’m glad we had you while we did.”

Bellamy had to bite his tongue to keep himself from correcting his sister’s past tense.

He refuses to believe she’s dead.

So he visits her not-grave most days, sits in front of it, and talks to her. He doesn’t think she can hear him, but it’s a comfort anyway. He tells her about the camp, tells her when the peace treaty is made official. He tells her when her mother delivers the first earth-born Ark child. He tells her when they go back to Mount Weather for supplies, although he doesn’t go along. He tells her he misses her, he begs her to come back.

Octavia looks at him sadly sometimes, because he’s living a half-life, frozen forever in remorse and pain and the hope that she’ll come back, a hope that no one else shares. He bristles when she does, because hope doesn’t make him pathetic. Hope is the opposite of sad. It’s hope. He’s the most positive fucking person in Camp Jaha. Everyone still looks at him like he lost someone, like he’s somehow broken beyond repair.

The second winter after she leaves, he gets trapped in the dropship for three days in a snowstorm. After that, he starts keeping things in the dropship. Spare supplies, dried meat, things to keep him alive if he’s desperate. Then more- he takes some of the furs from his cabin in Camp Jaha, a box to hold things, extra clothes, a spare bow. By the time she’s been gone three years, everything he owns is in the dropship. It’s ironic, he thinks- he’s back where he began, surrounded every day by the reminders of all he’s done.

Lincoln teaches him how to bind books and he starts keeping their history. Every day he writes a little bit more of what he remembers since they came to the ground. He interviews the delinquents, writes their stories. He fills one book, then a second, then a third. He records everything that happens in Camp Jaha. His accounts are detailed and exhaustive, and that’s how he passes the third year after she leaves. It’s much easier once he’s caught up- not much happens on the day-to-day. Someone takes a census and he keeps track of that.

He still hunts, of course, on the days he’s not writing. He needs food still, and so does the camp. And he digs graves. That’s his other job, now that he lives in the dropship. The first time it happens, it’s an accidental injury, and he’s there when they carry him, screaming in pain, to the infirmary. He looks to Jackson as he runs past, and sees resignment rather than determination, so Bellamy turns around and goes back to the dropship and digs a hole, six feet deep, two feet wide, eight feet long. It takes some doing to get himself out of the hole, but it’s there the next day when the Arkers come to bury him. They’re surprised, but relieved. He walks past them wordlessly, and that becomes his role.

Piece by piece, he repays them for all he’s done. He hunts their food, he writes their history, he digs their graves. He drowns in his sadness less every day. The graves of the ones that died because of him hurt less to look at. He still talks to her, all the time.

He starts to exist in a world of his own, somewhere removed from the people of the Ark. Octavia doesn't visit him as much anymore. She has a family, responsibilities. She doesn’t have the time to go to the graveyard and spend time with him. He’s not the same, anyway. He’s silent now, haunted, buried in grief like he’s another one of the bodies in the graveyard. She still loves him, but it’s easier not to be around him. He does all right, alone.

It’s ten years after she left. None of the Arkers can figure out how to explain him to their children, how to talk to them about the terrible realities of war and a man broken by the things he had to do. They’re young, in a time of peace. They understand death, but can they understand mass murder? Can they understand the blood on his hands? The inadequate explanations of who Bellamy is lend him an air of mystery, of intrigue. He becomes a legend, a spook-story that older siblings tell to younger ones. They dare each other to throw rocks at him and run away when he turns around.

He’s stopped going back to camp. A hunting patrol passes the dropship a few times a week, so he trades with them, gets food and stories and information. They tell him when he needs to dig a grave or two. The worst is when the graves are only a foot long. No one should have to bury their child. No one should have to bury an infant. Bellamy watches from the treeline as women weep over the graves of their children. He wishes he’d buried his children- because, as he gets older, that’s how he’s come to think of the delinquents. They were children, entrusted by fate to his care, the same way his sister was. He let them down. He should have helped bury them. It’s another regret on the mountain resting on his shoulders.

Fourteen years after she’s left, he has to bury his niece. She drowned in the river. Octavia is inconsolable. She was six. Their oldest son stands by her grave looking harrowed, his eyes full of a sadness too profound for a twelve-year-old. Bellamy goes to him and kneels next to him and talks to him in a low voice about guilt and grief and learning to forgive yourself, all the things he knows about, intimately, but cannot seem to do for himself. The boy buries his face in his uncle’s shoulder and cries.

That’s how Bellamy gets his apprentice, of sorts. His name is Luther and he has his mother’s fierce green eyes and his father’s quiet gentleness. At first he just comes to visit his sister’s grave, often, and talks to Bellamy about how he can’t imagine ever not feeling sad and angry and guilty and awful about what happened, and all Bellamy can tell him is that the foreverness of tragedy becomes less boundless with time. Bellamy tells him about his own pain, without describing the terrible things he’s done, and tells him about how immeasurably terrible everything was fourteen years ago, right after she left, when all the wounds of war on his body and soul were still fresh and bleeding. He tells him about remuneration, about the things he does for the Ark every day to repent for the lives that ended due to his mistakes. But he also tells him about accepting the things you cannot change and moving on from them.

When Luther asks why Bellamy hasn’t moved on, why he lives here surrounded by his sins, why he talks to her grave like she can hear him, why he’s still stuck in that day fourteen years ago when his whole world fell apart, all he can do is shrug helplessly and tell him that, sometimes, some things are just too big to come back from. Sometimes people just aren’t strong enough to pull themselves out, and so they stay there forever, caught in the flytrap of their misery forever.

It’s Luther’s idea to clean up the graveyard. The Arkers and Grounders have taken to visiting Mount Weather as a sort of human history museum, and one day Luther finds an old painting of a graveyard, all gnarled trees and mossy headstones, and he runs back to the dropship and tells Bellamy and begs him to let him try and make the dropship site look like a real graveyard from Atomic Earth days. Luther doesn’t really have a role in either society- the Grounders tried to train him for war, but he doesn’t have the stomach for killing, and he doesn’t have an Ark education so they won’t train him to be a doctor or an engineer. He’s been spending more and more time at the graveyard, and Bellamy wants to discourage it, but he sees how left out and lonely and burdensome Luther feels, because his brother went to school with the Ark children and his sister is a warrior, and he still isn’t quite past his sister’s death, so he can’t really look his parents in the eye. The life Bellamy leads appeals to him- solitary, subsistent, no one depending on him for anything other than digging holes and writing things down. So he begs Bellamy to let him clean up the graveyard, and that’s how they end up spending about a year, clearing away the debris from the delinquents, filling in the foxholes still left from the war, putting up new markers where the old ones have fallen down or are illegible.

When Luther suggests taking down the wall and building a new one that includes the eighteen graves outside, Bellamy loses it and yells at him. He doesn’t remember what he says, later, probably something cruel and unnecessary. But Luther leaves, upset, and doesn’t come back for a week.

That’s the first time he sees her. He’s clearing off the graves outside the wall, feeling sick and guilty over hurting his nephew’s feelings, when he looks up and sees her watching him from the treeline. She looks just like he remembers, but with a smile on her face. He freezes for a moment and chokes out her name, then he’s running towards her, shouting, but by the time he gets there she’s gone. He wanders around the woods for hours, calling her name well into the night, then finally collapses at the base of a tree, exhausted. That’s how Luther finds him the next morning, fast asleep on the forest floor. He shakes his uncle awake and tugs him back to the dropship, makes him tea and shuffles him off to bed.

When Bellamy looks at his nephew, he sees himself, a child with too much heaviness in his heart, lonesome and introspective and stronger than he should have to be, looking at his uncle with the same sad resolution Bellamy once looked at his mother on her bad days, when she could hardly get up in the morning, and he had to be the adult. He hated that, and it breaks his heart to see the same melancholy bitterness on Luther’s face.

Bellamy sleeps away the day, his dreams taking him back fifteen years to when the dropship was new and there were still 98 alive, to the bridge and the battle and fire and fear, to the fresh guilt of blood on his hands, to her face, bright and impassioned in the first few days, bloody and agonized the last time he saw her. He wakes up a few hours before dawn with tears on his face, and he goes outside and sits by her grave, and when he sees her standing in the forest, just as young and lovely and untouched by tragedy as their first day on the ground, he doesn’t go to her, just watches as she smiles at him, then walks away.

He talks to Luther about expanding the wall. They build an addition around the eighteen graves, with enough space for forty-seven more. He sends Luther to Camp Jaha, more a city than a settlement now, to get the names of the other 100 and a piece of scrap metal large enough to hold them all. They slave over it for a week with a tool he gets from Raven, some kind of laser pen blowtorch thing. Bellamy’s a historian, not a scientist, he’s not sure what it is. By the end of it they have a real, official memorial plaque for them, with birth years for all of them and death years for fifty-four, including the two who died in the plague their first winter. There’s only one year next to her name. Bellamy’s denial feels more token now than anything, but it’s been fifteen years- his belief is as much a part of him now as his regret. He can’t give it up, as willing as he is to admit to himself that holding onto it is pointless.

The hemorrhagic fever that struck the delinquents the first year hits Camp Jaha their sixteenth summer. Luther and Bellamy find out when one of the Arkers comes stumbling into the graveyard, gasping for breath, blood streaming down their face, and collapses at the gates. Bellamy immediately panics, grabs Luther, and drags him up into the dropship. He leaves a day later, to bury the body of the person who collapsed at the gates, leaving the marker blank because he doesn’t have the faintest clue who it was. He quarantines himself away from Luther for three days, just to make sure he’s safe, then tells his nephew to come down and help him dig graves. They prepare a dozen in the graveyard and a few in the annex and wait.

After a few days of no news, Bellamy sends Luther to Camp Jaha with strict instructions to find out the situation but keep himself safe and stay away from anyone who has blood on their face. He comes back with Octavia in tow, looking wrecked and worried, and she tells Bellamy that Lincoln and their other son are both sick in the infirmary, and the Grounders won’t go near Camp Jaha, so her daughter isn’t allowed to see her family, and she’s not allowed into the quarantine to see Lincoln or their son. Bellamy hugs her and sets up an extra bed in the dropship and she stays there for a week, reading Bellamy’s histories and  telling him things he needs to add.

One day she thanks him for taking Luther in the way he has. She tells him how he hasn’t been the same since his sister died, but he’s happy here. He fits in. Bellamy just shrugs nonchalantly and tells her that Luther is family. Octavia’s his responsibility, and so is her family. She just smiles and leans her head on his shoulder and watches her son clean a branch to patch up a hole in the wall. He looks up, smiles, and waves at them.

Lincoln and their son recover, but others aren’t so lucky. They end up burying twenty people, including Wick and one of the forty-seven Bellamy never knew. A few weeks later, Octavia and Lincoln leave on a long-term diplomatic mission to another clan of Grounders, and even though they ask Luther to come along, he decides to stay at the dropship instead.

Bellamy’s seen her a few more times since the day he chased her, but she always just stands at the treeline, watching him, and he doesn’t do anything, and she eventually disappears. When Luther moves in, he starts reading the histories Bellamy’s written about the delinquents and the Sky People’s first few years on the ground, the ones Luther was too young to remember, and he starts asking questions. He asks about all the delinquents, but Bellamy notices he never mentions her. Octavia probably told him not to. Bellamy usually just tells him he can ask his questions to the delinquents themselves the next time he goes back to Camp Jaha- all the ones who made it through Mount Weather are still alive, except the woman who died in the hemorrhagic fever that summer. He thought he’d immunized himself to the pain of the memories by living in them, surrounding himself with them, but apparently not. Every time Luther brings up one of the delinquents who died in the beginning, or the war with the Grounders, or Mount Weather, it’s like Bellamy’s back there all over again, immersed in the heady terror of being twenty-three, a leader, and completely out of his depth. He asks about Finn one day, the village he slaughtered, and that conversation makes Bellamy feel gutted, because as much as he wasn’t there and couldn’t have done anything, it still feels like a colossal failure in his judgment, because he saw how unbalanced Finn was and still let him go with a gun. Bellamy doesn’t like to believe that responsibility for death is relegated just to the hands of the killer- it’s everyone  who put them in a position where they could, where they felt like they had to. It’s why he’ll never blame her for all she did during the war, all the blood on her hands, because she never would have ended lives she didn’t have to. He was there- it was, for her, never a matter of whether or not to kill, but rather whose life she would rather save. He doesn’t afford himself the same leniency.

Whenever he talks about the 100, the dropship and the graveyard are too much. The ghosts of them are too much, he has to leave. So he usually goes walking in the woods, and it’s on those walks that he starts seeing her more often.

He’s not sure why he’s just seeing her now, after almost seventeen years- maybe it’s age, or madness, or maybe it’s because he’s only just begun to accept the possibility that she’s gone. It’s a mystery, one he doesn’t care to unravel. He just accepts her presence at the corner of his eye, half-hidden among the trees, always watching him.

“Why are you here?” he finally says to her, one day, sitting on the edge of the waterfall they found so long ago when they were looking for Jasper the first day (was that really their first day? It had felt like a lifetime then. It felt like a lifetime now).

She comes and crouches on a rock a few feet away from him, trailing her fingers through the water. They don’t break the surface. She shrugs. “I missed you.”

“Why didn’t you come back?” he asks, looking directly at her, studying her. She really is exactly as he remembers, down to the crown braid in her golden waves. She doesn’t answer, he changes his tack. “Why now? Why not before? Why not ten years ago?”

“You weren’t ready,” she says simply. He looks down at the water, hands curling into white-knuckled fists.

“I’m not ready now,” he replies quietly, his voice wavering. When he looks back at her, she’s gone, and he laughs bitterly to himself.

He doesn’t try to talk to her again, though he still sees her often, and she doesn’t stay as far away anymore. She’ll try to start a conversation sometimes, innocuous phrases like, “The graveyard looks nice, I’m glad you’re taking care of it” and “How’s Octavia?” He doesn’t respond. She might think he’s ready, but he isn’t. It feels a little pathetic, to still be so broken-open over things that happened seventeen years ago, but then Luther will ask about something in the history and it’ll lead Bellamy down the well-tread path in his mind where all his mistakes live, and the sheer magnitude of them gives him the excuse he needs to allow himself his pain.

Luther starts spending longer and longer in Camp Jaha. Bellamy will send him for information or supplies first thing in the morning and not see him again until the afternoon. When he finally broaches the topic with his nephew, he gets an awkward shuffle and a mumbled deflection, followed by a swift escape to whatever chores are waiting. One morning, Bellamy decides to go along with Luther and get to the bottom of it, and it only takes about five minutes of Luther staring at a bright-eyed boy around his own age with a crooked smile and a full-bodied laugh to understand exactly what’s happening. Bellamy suppresses a smile, pats his nephew on the back, and tells him to go talk to the boy while he takes care of the business they came for.

He sees a few of the delinquents around, and it’s… weird. They don’t really see him as Bellamy, leader of the 100, fearless warrior, willing to give everything to protect his people. They see him as the emotional wreck who removed himself from society to dig graves. Luther told him they don’t really like to talk about him, and he understands- they’d rather preserve the war hero than confront the reality of what that war did to him. He envies them. He’d like to avoid the reality of his post-war self, too.

When Luther gets back that evening, Bellamy asks him about the boy and he blushes and stutters for a moment before giving in to his uncle’s knowing look and just gushing, lovesick, until he runs out of things to say. Bellamy smiles and tells his nephew he’s happy for him, and there’s a long pause before Luther asks if he loved her. Bellamy knows who he means, but he asks anyway, and the sound of her name twists a knife that’s been in his heart for seventeen years.

It’s a long time before Bellamy responds, and when he does, he tells Luther that he thinks he might have, that he definitely could have, but that things are different during war. Bonds are stronger, friendships grow quickly, feelings seem urgent in a way they aren’t the rest of the time. He thinks whatever he felt for her could have been real and it could have been just the infatuation of a beautiful, brave girl in a desperate time, but he’d like to believe it was the former. He’d like to believe they could have had something, if she’d stayed.

Because it always comes back to that, doesn’t it? Everything is just a question of ‘if she’d stayed.’ It feels melodramatic to think his entire life hinged on that one point, the grief-stricken decision of an overwhelmed and deeply hurt girl, too young for the burden she carried, but… it’s true. They’d shared a guilt and pain that no one else did, the unique, horrific mark of genocide on their souls, and he thinks if she’d just stayed then they could have gotten through it together, worked through all the difficulty and heaviness and pain that came with saving their people. He thinks they could have made it out the other side. But she left, left them all, left him alone with his demons, and he doesn’t know if his inability to conquer them was a result of his own weakness or their magnitude. There’s a wound, deep in his heart, childish and humiliating, inflicted by her abandonment, by the fact that she didn’t seem to think they could help each other, that she didn’t think either of them were worth helping.

Neither Bellamy nor Luther speaks for the rest of the night. When he sleeps, Bellamy is haunted by nightmares, a parade of corpses in front of him, running through the words chasing the distant sound of her screaming for help, for him, but never getting any closer. He wakes up in a cold sweat with a choked scream and he goes out to her grave. She stands against the tree and looks at him with sad eyes as he stares at her name and weeps for the first time in years.

“We would’ve loved each other,” she says softly. “If things had been different, we would’ve loved each other so much.”

“I did,” he sobs. “I did. I do.”

“Bellamy,” she says softly, the sadness and fondness and wistful ache in her tone saying all the things she doesn’t.

Luther doesn’t ask about her again, after that.

Octavia and Lincoln come back abruptly in the spring, earlier than expected, bringing news of war. When the news reaches the dropship, Luther looks at Bellamy with expectation in his eyes, but the thought of leading his people to their deaths again pulls all the air from his chest and he has to leave the room. He tries to ignore the disappointment in his nephew’s eyes. Letting Luther read the histories was a mistake- he has an image in his head now, idolizes Bellamy as an unflappable, calculating general, expects him to rise to the occasion. But he can’t. He was a coward then, only interested in protecting his sister and himself, and it was only because of her that he had the strength to be brave. Without that, he’s just a selfish, ruined gravedigger, nothing more. Not a hero. Not a leader.

So when the bodies start coming, he starts digging. He tells Luther that he’s welcome to go fight if he wants, tells him that he doesn’t have to stay here and help bury the dead. Luther refuses. They’re a part of the war, he says, because the people who gave their lives to protect them deserve respect, and this is their place.

Luther’s boy falls in the war, and he doesn’t leave the dropship for days afterwards. When he does leave, Bellamy finds him sitting at her grave, knees drawn up to his chest. Bellamy goes and sits by him, and Luther tells him that he understands, now, why Bellamy’s so lost. When he starts crying, Bellamy wraps an arm around his shoulders and murmurs reassurances. In the trees, she watches them mourn.

The war ends after a few months with a hard-won and long-negotiated peace treaty. Bellamy and Luther take empty books to Camp Jaha and fill them with the stories of soldiers, doctors, civilians. They capture the war while it’s fresh in the hearts of the people, and it’s difficult and painful, but necessary. Luther writes his own account, just a few pages long, of the boy he loved and lost. When he shows it to Bellamy, he tries to tell him, in the subtlest terms he can manage, that Bellamy should seek closure, too. His uncle doesn’t say anything, but he spends a lot of time at her grave over the next few weeks.

She starts visiting him more often. She’ll follow him around while he takes care of the graves, silent company in his duties. When he goes into the woods, she goes with him. When he sits at her grave, she sits with him. She doesn’t try to talk, and he feels as if she’s waiting for him to speak first, so, a month after the end of the war, he does.

“Luther thinks I should learn to let go of you.”

“Maybe you should,” she replies easily, running her fingers through the long grass.

“I don’t want to forget you,” he says, fighting to keep his voice even.

“You won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?” He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and she leans back on her hands, tilting her head back as if she’s basking in the sun, even though the sky is covered horizon to horizon in heavy gray clouds.

“Because you never forget anything important.” She smiles at him. “You’re a historian.”

“Sometimes I forget what you looked like,” he admits, quietly, almost to himself.

“But you don’t forget me. You don’t forget what I was like. That’s what matters. Not what’s here,” she gestures to her face. “But what’s in here.” She rests her hand on his chest, over his heart, and for a moment he can imagine he feels it, warm and solid, and he could almost cry, but when he reaches up to cover her hand with his, all he feels is his own shirt. “That’s the memory that matters.”

“Why didn’t you stay?” he asks. “Why did you have to leave? We could have… it would have been better. We could have gotten better, together. You didn’t have to leave.” He turns to look at her, imploring, and she just smiles sadly.

“I thought I did,” she answers. “It was too much. I was so young, Bellamy. I was… I understand, now, why Charlotte threw herself off that cliff.”

“Me too.” He looks back at her name on the tree, and he doesn’t notice when she disappears.

Lincoln gets sick, and Luther leaves for a while to help his family. Bellamy misses him while he’s gone, but the increased workload is a nice distraction from the familiar paths of his mind. At night, he lays out under the stars and thinks in circles about what Luther said about moving on, right after the war. Bellamy’s past forty now, though he hasn’t celebrated a birthday since before coming to the ground. Maybe it’s time for him to forgive himself for the things he did when he was young and desperate. Maybe he’ll never be able to do enough penance, and maybe he already has. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could see the balance of good and evil in the world, in himself. He wishes he could know, empirically, truthfully, absolutely, that it was okay to forgive himself.

He stares up at the sky, at the constant constellations, the distant explosions that have been the backdrop to his entire life. Everything has changed, couldn’t be more different, but when he looks up it’s like he’s six years old again, staring out the window when his mother told him to leave the apartment for a while. It’s like he’s twenty-one again, glancing out at the infinity of space as he hurries to his guard training. It’s like he’s twenty-three again, those first nights on the ground, the wonder of a sky framed by living forest rather than cold metal. He remembers an old book he read once, where the stars were people, immortals who sat in the sky eons away, watching humans from up above and wondering at their lives. He wonders what they think of him.

“It’s kind of magical, isn’t it?” she says, laying down in the grass next to him. “They’re so ancient. Those are the same stars people have looked at for millions of years. Atomic Earth people looked at the same stars. Roman emperors. The first humans, probably.”

“How do I know if it’s… if I can forgive myself?” he asks.

“Would you forgive me? If I was where you are, spending twenty years alone tending to the graves of kids whose deaths I felt responsible for, surrounding myself and burying myself and never letting myself forget all the fucked-up choices we made back then, would you think I deserved forgiveness?”

“Yes,” he answers immediately. “You never… I was ready to forgive you then. I forgave you so long ago.”

“Then why won’t you forgive yourself?” He can’t look at her, he can hear the heartbreak in her imploring voice, he knows if he looked at her it would just be too much.

“It’s different.”

“You’ve done your penance, Bellamy. You did your penance when we brought down Mount Weather. You saved us all so many times. You’re a hero. They’re going to tell legends about you someday.”

“They should tell legends about you.”

“Oh, I’ll be in them, of course,” she says wryly. “You’d never let anyone forget about me.”

“No,” he says with a smile. “Never.”

“Come with me, I want to show you something.” She stands, and holds her hand out to him, as if to help him up. He doesn’t take it, but gets to his feet and follows her into the woods.

They walk for hours, past the sleeping giant of Camp Jaha, towards Mount Weather. She veers north, a few miles past the gates, and leads him into unfamiliar woods. They walk and walk and walk, and finally, after what seems like ages, she stops, next to a ruined, skeletal structure that may once have been a shoddily built cabin. There’s a pile of mostly-rotted furs in the corner, and she stands over them. Lying half-buried in the detritus of the forest and whoever lived here so long ago is a single bone, a shoulder blade bleached white with time and weather. He falls to the ground and picks it up with shaking hands, then looks up at her.

“Is this…?”

“All that’s left, yeah.” She smiles sadly. “Animals and the elements got to the rest, unfortunately.”

“Why didn’t you bring me here sooner?” His voice cracks, tears streaming down his face. He chokes back a sob. “I could have- have given you a proper… I could have-”

“You weren’t ready,” she says gently, sitting down in front of him and reaching out to rest her hand on his, still clutching the bone with a white-knuckled vise grip. He closes his eyes and imagines, for a moment, he can feel her touch, soft and sure like it was in life, and god it feels so real, for just a fleeting moment, and it breaks him, and he’s not sure how long he sits there holding the scarce remains of the girl he loved as he wails and weeps, mourning her in a way he never allowed himself before. “Oh, Bellamy,” she says, and he doesn’t see her move, wrap him in her arms, stroke his hair, but he feels it, and he’s twenty-three again, and it’s like no time has passed and all the things he did are still fresh on his heart, and she’s there. “Forgive yourself, please.”

When he calms, opens his eyes, she’s gone, and he’s sitting there, alone in the forest, the last piece of her in his hands.

It takes him almost the entire day to find his way back to the graveyard, and when he gets there he breaks the earth in front of her tree, losing himself in the repetitive, familiar motion of digging. The grave isn’t big, not even a foot square, not as deep as usual. It’s just one bone. It’s all he has, it’s not much, it doesn’t need much. He tamps the earth down on top of it, an uneven, off-center lump in the middle of a grave that’s been empty for twenty years.

He goes inside, sits down with an empty book, and writes. He writes everything he remembers, every detail of her, her courage and her steadfast strength and the way she laughed, he writes the hard decisions she had to make and her fear and her insecurity and all the mistakes she made, he writes her vision, her charisma, her artist’s hands, all the things she did right. He lays her down on paper, commits her to memory, creates her in all her truth, hopes that the future remembers not just the ideal she’s certain to become, not just the hero, the warrior, the leader, but also the hopeful, untested girl who didn’t always make the right call but did her best anyway, who never gave up until it was over.

After that, he fills another book with all the words he has for her and for himself, all the pain and penitence of the past twenty years, letters to himself, to a dead girl, to no one at all. He writes for days, hardly taking a break, and when he finishes, he pushes his chair back and walks outside into the graveyard. The sun shines down on him, and he can see Luther in the distance, coming up the path with a spring in his step, and he smiles. The world is new.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://www.thejgatsbykid.tumblr.com)!


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